Delhi

Khushwant Singh's novel Delhi is narrated by an aging, foul-mouthed libertine who keeps coming back to the city after his adventures abroad. He compares it to returning to Bhagmati, his longtime lover. She is a hijra, and he is devoted to her as much as to the city itself.

The story covers some six hundred years. The narrator moves back and forth across time and place, piecing the city's past together as he goes. Along the way he meets poets and princes, saints and sultans, seductresses and betrayers, emperors and eunuchs, all of whom left their mark on Delhi's character.

The book is frank, earthy and sexually charged, and it treats Delhi as a living, many-layered place rather than a backdrop. By the end of the narrator's long journey, the city has become something more lasting than a list of rulers and dynasties.